Nuvole's files and documents management feature is now available for the latest version of Open Atrium

We received many requests to make an updated version of our Atrium Folders feature available for the latest version of Open Atrium, the excellent Drupal-based solution for Intranets developed by Phase2.

One of the new key features of Drupal 8 is the possibility to deal with configuration in code. Since configuration is now in text files, we want to put it under version control in Git to enjoy the many advantages this brings: comparing configuration states, keeping a history of configuration changes and even moving configuration between sites.

Configuration Management in Drupal 8 elegantly solves staging configuration between different environments but it still misses the ability to package configuration into separates modules for later reuse. A patched version of the Configuration development module helps addressing that!

Features done right? Features done wrong? What changed, what improved, what's still missing.

Nuvole gave two talks about the current status of Configuration Management in Drupal 8 at European Drupal events in the last few weeks: Drupal Days Milan 2014 and Drupal Camp Alpe Adria 2014. Developers attending the events were mostly interested in how the future Drupal 8 Configuration Management capabilities will compare to Drupal 7, with and without the Features module.

What CMI will bring to D8 and "Poorman's Features" for packaging configuration in D8

We have always told attendees of our Drupal 7 "Code-driven development" trainings that embracing the idea that configuration must be stored in files and not in the database would make their Drupal development future-ready: the specific processes would necessarily change but the concept would stay and be reinforced in Drupal 8, thanks to the nice work being done in the Configuration Management Initiative.

Effective today, I (Andrea) have become an officer of the Apache Software Foundation, in my new role as Vice President for the Apache OpenOffice (commonly known as "OpenOffice") project. This might be an occasion for the Drupal community to take a closer look at the Apache Software Foundation and its projects.

After the successful experience from last June, Nuvole is proud to join again the Drupal Global Training Day initiative on September 14th. This time we will hold the event in Parma, Italy, and, following the initiative guidelines, we will give a free generic introduction to Drupal, focusing on Drupal as a platform, its community, what can be easily done with the available modules and what can be reached with a bit (or a lot!) of customization.

The DrupalCon Munich 2012 is just over. There were quite a few inspiring sessions, but here are a few highlights of the moments and topics where the Nuvole team was mostly involved: out Code-Driven Development training and BoF sessions about automating Drupal development and the future of Open Atrium.

Public sites, private groups and organization of events with Open Atrium

At Nuvole we have always supported the idea that Open Atrium can deal with complex use cases. Modules like Spaces, PURL and Organic groups can push the limit of the platform far beyond being a simple-yet-powerful intranet software. We were already experimenting with building public websites and simple distributions-like mini-sites with Open Atrium for quite some time, but now the new Alfa Puentes project gave us the opportunity to blend together all those customizations in one powerful platform.

Features are a well-known and very useful tool to streamline Drupal development and write reusable components. However, if you get serious about automating as much as possible in your Drupal development, you need to add other tools to your daily practices, and master them properly: forget the tedious, error-prone, point-and-click and embrace Code-Driven Development.

Nuvole is proud to join the Drupal Global Training Day on June 22nd but this won't be our usual, highly technical, training about streamlining Drupal Development that you may have seen at Drupalcon Chicago 2011, DrupalCon Denver 2012 and that is scheduled for DrupalCon Munich 2012 too. This time we will focus on Drupal as a platform, its community, what can be easily done with the available modules and what can be reached with a bit (or a lot!) of customization.

Our review of Tracy Smith's Open Atrium book just made it to Slashdot, confirming there is a widespread interest in this popular Drupal distribution. (By the way, the book is not, and is not meant to be, useful to developers, but if you build Open Atrium projects you should definitely recommend it to your clients: it will save a lot of time to you and them).